Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir

Beautifully written pages of suffocation. It shows the systematic mutilation of age of innocence. A child, and later a teenager, telling their stories of a life always from inside of something - a house, a cupboard, a barbed wire enclosed classroom, a window. It captures a life held captive.

These are just early thoughts on the book.

Rumours of spring — it's a coming of age story set in Kashmir in the 1990s. It's haunting and beautiful and heartbreaking. I felt shame and sadness while reading it. Shame because I had no idea how terrifying life in Kashmir was and maybe to date it still is. Covid feels like a baby compared to the terrors and loss these people live through every single day for years. Sadness because it isn't in past and elements of it still exist. The book was also beautiful because it shows small slices of joy and normalcy. For a debut novel, it was so well written! The narrative structure and flow were very well done. Each chapter was seamlessly able to focus on a new character or event or place and tell its complete story while sitting to the overall arc.